A blog for the Devon Wargames Group, which meets on the second Saturday of each month at the Whipton Institute, 20 Village Road, Whipton, Exeter, EX4 8AW. Doors open at 10.30am.

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Saturday, 8 September 2012

September Games - Normandy to Turin

Hi all,

The autumn season was kicked off with a couple of games covering action in the boacage using "Kampfgruppe Normandy" and the Relief of Turin in the War of Spanish Succession using "Beneath the Lilly Banners".

The opportunity came up today to have a go at the KG Normandy rule set from the now defunct Warhammer Historical stable. As a confirmed WWII and "I aint been shot mum" fan, I was looking forward to see how these rules play. We had a typical Normandy scenario with the Yanks trying to push down a narrow bocage festooned road supported by lots of artillery and a few Shermans. They were faced off by a similar group of German infantry supported by a couple of PzIV (Tigers).

US Recce and Artillery OP survey the road ahead

I have to say that first impressions are positive, with a straightforward IgoUgo play sequence based on command points to allow unit activations. The combat and morale is all d6 based and we found the game was easily learnt and sped along well. The core of the system lies around the morale management of your force. As a force suffers losses and suppressions, the commanders have to decide when to rally suppressed sections or vehicles to take up the fight at the risk of losing army morale points which will eat away at your forces will to continue the fight. In the end both sides were forced to not rally sections because they couldn't run the risk of a big loss of morale. This forced both sides to rely on the final combats being done by their remaining fresh units.

GI's in the bocage

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"Move out"

"Achtung Amis!!"

Scratch one Ronson

The recce up the road comes under fire

Payback - scratch one Tiger?

Another panzer brews up

US armour closes in as the Germans prepare to bug out.

Our game swung away from the German force as soon as both their Panzers were lost and the resultant drop in morale. This with multiple unit suppressions left them teetering on retreat, and with the failure of the last remaining fresh section unable to take out a US Sherman with Panzerfausts, the resultant return fire ended all German resistance.

Two observations from our game was that we felt that Panzerfausts were not as representativly destructive as their historical counterparts proved to be. This could easily be remedied by altering their strike factor. The other is with the mechanic around using fire to suppress the enemy being rather to predictive. ie The US would brassup the German hedgerows but not advance until they could see that all or most sections were suitably suppressed. Quite sensible really, but not very realistic. One alternative would be to indicate potentially suppressed units but not confirm their status until they wished to activate thus keeping all sides uncertain about their state.

A very enjoyable afternoons wargaming, thanks to Nathan, Jason, Gus, Martin and Ian.